The folks over at Gizmodo have a delightful article on a zooming technology that Sony has demoed for both the PS3 as well as their portable device, the PSP.  From the video you can see a lot of the nice touches that we’ve come to expect of high-quality zooming implementations.  Things like springs for smooth zooming, total responsiveness to the user and remarkably fast resolve time from one zoom level to the next.  It truly is mesmerizing to watch.

The ability and apparent usability of the PSP (at 2:10 into the video) is particularly cool.  The portable device’s navigation buttons appear to be intuitive and every bit as performant as on PS3.  I can’t wait to see what people come up with after Sony ships this to developers “soon”.

-Kevin Hanes

We’ve taken all of the pieces of Seadragon technology and wrapped them up in a nice bow with the new seadragon.com. Just drop the URL to any image on the web (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF, etc.) into the box, and we serve up a smooth zooming Seadragon viewer for it. Behind the scenes we’re using DeepZoomTools on an Azure server to handle the conversion, and serving it up using Silverlight Deep Zoom when available and Seadragon Ajax when not. The result is (hopefully) an extremely smooth and simple experience, even though there’s so many bits that make it up.

It all started with a suggestion from Sean Dunn, which rolled into Out of the Box projects by Aseem Kishore and Boyd Ferris. Ben Vanik wrote the Silverlight viewer we’re using, and James Darpinian wrapped it up with Seadragon Ajax so we can use Silverlight if available and JavaScript otherwise. From there, Aseem did the lion’s share of the work to build out the service and tie the whole thing together, with UI design by Shepherd Yang. Ken Perkins kept us all on track, and Jesse Wang made sure the whole thing was solid. Of course everyone on the Seadragon team was involved in one way or another, and we’re all terribly excited to have it finally up on the web!

We’re especially interested to see how people end up using the site. Every time there’s a huge image posted on digg, I’d love to see it posted via seadragon.com so people can see it better. I can see Seadragon being a great alternative to ViewOnBlack for sharing your Flickr images. People can even use it to present their art portfolios on their own sites. If you see or think of any interesting uses, I’d love to hear about it!

Janete Perez on the Expression team has written up intros to some of the new features in the June 2009 Deep Zoom Composer release. Check them out:

Adding Links

Creating Menus

Slideshow Support

(via)

– Ian Gilman

In their own words: “PsychoPEDIA is a NYC-based independent culture network that offers an inside-look at budding movements and standout subjects within the worlds of music, film, fashion, art and sports”.  I’m not sure exactly what that all entails; apparently though, part of it is a bunch of interesting news stories and videos.

Of interest to those of us in the zooming UI space is how the content is laid out on the site.  Initially, you are given a grid of  icons, but click on one and the background changes and the icons slowly disappear, leaving only a single row.  Then, whoosh, you are being panned rather swiftly to a new background image where a video plays or an article of news is shown.  Each piece of content occupies its own space in the site, and each time you go to it, you are arriving at the same “place” and panning past the same set of items.  It’s an interesting way to lay out a site and would be fun if done with free, or semantic, zoom to navigate around the canvas.  Even as it is, it’s good to see sites using a canvas as a metaphor for how their sites are laid out.

-Kevin Hanes

The Deep Zoom Composer Team has just released a new version with an improved DeepZoomTools.dll. They’ve also posted a call for suggestions for future versions of Deep Zoom Composer.

Daniel Gasienica has added collection support to Kapil Thangavelu’s Python script and posted it here.

By the way, I’m trying to keep track of Seadragon tools on the zooming group wiki; if you know of others, please add them or let me know.

The new version of Deep Zoom Composer includes a .NET DLL, DeepZoomTools.dll, that you can use to write your own DZI and DZC creation tools. It even supports sparse images.

If you do something with it, I’d love to hear about it!

Kapil Thangavelu has created a Python script for converting images into DZI format. In addition to Python, you’ll need the Python Imaging Library. See his blog post for more information, along with an analysis of why he chose DZI over other zooming formats.

Needless to say, this is an interesting option for people who need to convert a lot of images, or convert on a server, or who don’t use Windows. DZI is an open format, so hopefully we’ll be seeing many more interesting tools and scripts in the future.